2005
ASP Annual Award Recipients

Robert
Kraft has been awarded this year the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Medal
for a lifetime of contributions in the field of astronomy. Indeed,
few astronomers can match Kraft’s record of service to the
community: he served as President of the American Astronomical Society
(1974 to 1976); he was the director of Lick Observatory from 1981
to 1991, during the pivotal time when the 10-meter Keck telescope
was being designed, purchased, and built; and from 1997 to 2000,
he served as President of the International Astronomical Union.

As
a researcher, Kraft made contributions so fundamental that they
have filtered down into introductory astronomy textbooks. For example,
he was the first to show that novae, stars that undergo a sudden
increase in brightness, are actually close binary star systems in
which the more evolved star (usually a white dwarf) siphons hydrogen
and helium from its expanding companion. The transferred material
undergoes rapid accretion onto the dense white dwarf that leads
to an explosion or novae. His work on the spatial distribution of
Cepheid variables was critical in calibrating their absolute magnitudes
for use as distance indicators. His research on stellar rotation
showed that stars like the Sun spin slower and slower as they age
because winds of charged particles carry away the stars’ angular
momentum. And Kraft’s work on the chemical
composition of stars provided evidence for deep mixing of elements
in red giants.

Kraft’s
service and research have earned him several awards. He is a member
of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and an Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1995, the American Astronomical Society honored his work by naming
him the Henry Norris Russell Lecturer for his lifetime of achievement
in astronomy.

Kraft
earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from the University
of Washington and his Ph.D. degree in astronomy from the University
of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, in 1967 as an astronomer at Lick Observatory
and professor of astronomy and astrophysics, after holding assistant
professor positions at Indiana University and the University of
Chicago. Robert Kraft received his doctorate in 1955 and has been
contributing to the field of astronomy ever since.